


behind a clutch of spiny oysters

by muined



Category: Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: F/M, Ibuki-centric, POV Second Person, Pre-Despair (Dangan Ronpa), disguises, fictional album review
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-10-06 22:02:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17353418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muined/pseuds/muined
Summary: Notes on Ibuki, from a conscientious observer.





	behind a clutch of spiny oysters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theleonhearted](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theleonhearted/gifts).



> Heavily inspired by @theleonhearted’s “When The Moon Comes,” my favorite K-ton! fic and quite possibly favorite fanfic ever. Go read that!
> 
> This, though, is something I wrote in summer 2017; I’m not satisfied with it, but I’ve owed K-ton! fic to @theleonhearted long enough. It isn't canon compliant with DR3, because, um, I haven't watched DR3, and am going to pretend it never happened. Traditional Orenronen-era titles and speech patterns, or my best approximation of them, because I’m old.

> __
> 
> Come in, come in. The water’s fine! You can’t get lost
> 
> __
> 
> here. Even if you want to hide behind a clutch
> 
> __
> 
> of spiny oysters — I’ll find you.
> 
> __

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, "Invitation"

 

Mioda was the reason you began dyeing your hair and the reason you stopped keeping your distance. Originally you had worn wigs, and kept your long dark hair spooled in pincurls under them. For years, pincurls: little burial mounds beneath the itchy turf of innumerable false scalps. Each a graveyard, demarcated by bobby-pin crucifixes. Though you’d made sure that these wigs had always been convincing, visually, the irregular topography of your head would've given you away to anyone who had but tousled your hair. Your height, of course, along with the identity you had adopted, had kept your classmates from this pursuit.

Your classmates, that is, bar one. Mioda was liable to clamber up your back, monkey-like. You took a week off of school, feigning illness, in order to apply the multiple bleach treatments necessary to match Togami's shade of blond. You’d holed up in your room, which for weeks afterwards would reek.

Mioda's bangs were a mess of stinging nettles, garish in their neediness. You could tell that while her bangs had been bleached and dyed, inexpertly, the light streaks that striated the rest of her hair had been applied with chalk.

"When Ibuki's stash runs out, she uses the sticks from the classroom blackboards," she informed you once. You hadn't asked.

"You're nothing if not, ah, economical," you replied, stymied.

You never knew what to say or do around Mioda, you who prided yourself on knowing exactly how your mark would behave in every possible situation. Mioda was uncharted territory. Would Togami have been begrudgingly tolerant of her antics? Mildly irritated? Distantly bemused? You ran with the last option, mostly.

She didn't put a great deal of time into her hair. You watched it grow progressively greasier each day, until she bothered, twice weekly, to wash it. The horns were a constant, though. Initially you assumed she erected them anew each morning, but once accustomed to the cones you began to observe a certain dented quality to their peaks that led you to believe she slept on them.

 

You had first been made aware of Mioda's existence over the airwaves; Hope's Peak had a radio station, and she hosted the station's only program dedicated to music rather than to news or sports or education. Listeners scrambled for the volume dials of their radios whenever a song seemed to be winding down, because Mioda had a habit of screaming straight into the mic at the top of each of her talk-spots.

"Aaaaaiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeee!" she would screech before identifying the song. “Didn’t that get your blood pumping?! It got Ibuki’s blood pumping! Ibuki thinks she’s gonna have to lower her salt intake before the end of the hour!”

What you didn't know that was that Mioda hadn't released music of her own since enrolling at Hope's Peak. The last thing she had put out was a digital EP the summer before freshman year. First she claimed she was focusing on her radio show, gathering inspiration for her next album from the music of other groups, and then it was that she was occupied with schoolwork—and then Mioda offered no excuses.

But when she had, this is what you’d learned: "Ibuki's album has been downloaded a grand total of 3,000 times."

"Is that good?" you had asked. "I'm, ah, unused to comprehending units that aren't millions."

"Well, Ibuki isn't losing any money." She paused to take a bite of her pasta. The Academy’s cafeteria fare has a highbrow, international flair. "If Byakuya-chan wants to think of it in terms of money, which he probably does, considering. Ibuki's parents did. They refused to let Ibuki release her baby on vinyl, which she would've preferred. 'Impractical girl!' they admonished Ibuki, and then fluuuuuuuung her into the piranha pit in the backyard."

You raised your eyebrows.

"Figuratively. They were right, though. Ibuki didn't want to sign with a label again. This latest album (digital as it ended up being) was aaaaallllllll Ibuki. She recorded it in her room, which by lucky chance had been soundproofed years before...! Sitting criss cross applesauce on the carpet and then layering each instrumental track. Like a lasagna."

You marveled briefly at her ability to express parentheses verbally. "So, 3,000 hits?"

"Not bad, for a labor of love, Ibuki guesses.” She abandoned this conversation abruptly, as she often did, and alighted upon a new one. "Lasagna. Ibuki likes pesto pasta best, for its greenness and because sometimes there are pine nuts in it. Pine nuts, Byakuya-chan!" She thought for a moment. "Of course, Byakuya-chan can afford to eat pine nuts by the handful."

"And I have been known to do so, upon occasion," you mumbled, absently.

 

"AND HERE WE THOUGHT PUNK WAS DEAD: MEET THE MUSICAL WUNDERKIND WHO WANTS TO 'MOSH ON THE GRAVE' OF COMMERCIAL LIGHT ROCK," read the cover of the magazine that hung on Mioda's dormitory wall. Its glass frame was broken. "In one of Ibuki's fits of capriciousness," she admitted.

You found the issue online, read it. The cover story detailed Mioda's musical history; you learned that the band to which Mioda had belonged had been assembled by the record company she had signed on with, of schoolgirls from several different middle schools (and one neotenic twenty-something starlet made to wear a matching uniform). Black Cherry's image had been carefully constructed to resemble that of a high school music club. They had reached #9 on national pop charts with a song that you had never heard, titled (with sort of a sanitized version of Mioda’s linguistic sensibilities; she had been their songwriter) "Afterschool Poyoyon Hour."

Lower on the search results page you find a more recent review of Mioda's first and only solo album:

> _Despite her young age, Ibuki Mioda is a seasoned master of irony; In the album's opening track, “Let My Feelings Reach You Too,” Mioda pastes a decidedly bubbly and conventional title onto a song that's anything but. “Feelings,” an abstract reworking of a pure pop single from Mioda’s alma mater, Black Cherry, is eardrum-puncturing metal that sees the teen opine tonelessly on the futility of love, over a chorus of her own screams, a mildly apt but ultimately unlistenable juxtaposition that is neither authentic enough for metalheads nor sufficiently musically sound to satisfy the learned ear. Mioda favors compositions that would be more accurately described as “outsider art” than “unconventional,” and graces only a select few songs with the hooks that defined the music she produced under her now estranged record label. When she does so, the results are charming: “Childbirth Was Fun, But Who the F**k's the Baby Daddy?” is both an irrepressible earworm with ska punk flair and a misanthropic meditation on infidelity._
> 
> _Verdict: Ibuki Mioda's rapid genre-jumping is offputting and detrimental to the album as a cohesive piece. She seems to possess the technical ability but lack the experience to do her compositions justice. Although her perspective (jaded girl band alum) is fresh, Mioda's schtick (deconstructing pop) is tired, and her means of sticking it to the man unsubtle. To listen to Mioda is to be yelled at, both literally and metaphorically. She's obviously very talented, and I maintain that even without regard for her age. But Ibuki Mioda's solo debut is fated to become a novel footnote in the annals of modern Japanese rock. Whether the tempering effect of age will allow her oeuvre to expand remains to be seen._

You logged out of the library computer.

 

Mioda was placed in a remedial reading course.

"It's not like Ibuki doesn't try," she intoned, uncharacteristically sullen. "If Ibuki can't get through _The Tale of Genji_ , then maybe they should stop trying to make Ibuki read Murasaki and start letting her compose odes to the cafeteria's pesto pasta."

It ate at her. It ate at you, too. She was so facile with language. As a composer, she was brilliant. Mioda danced circles around the handful of other students enrolled in the academy's Music Theory course. She didn’t deserve to be humiliated. Hope's Peak's unjust core curriculum was to blame: Mioda was told in very one-sided dialogues with administrators, who expressed patronizing disappointment, that she was not a well-rounded individual. (You had formed the same opinion of her, though in a different context: Mioda's angularity was concerning to you, which is to say that whenever you looked upon her elbows you became concerned for her health and continued well-being.) Mioda goosestepped down the hallway, mockingly fascist, in protest. She made fun of your overlong titles, too. But she ended up enjoying Sei Shonagon’s _Pillow Book_ , and for a while you believed things were going to turn out alright.

You fell in with Mioda in early spring and spent lunch periods with her weekly, and then twice weekly, up to and into the summer. Both of you liked the cafeteria, but sometimes, too, you left the academy during your lunch hour and bought convenience store meals, ate outside. Mioda played with her food before even before opening it, made the fisherman mascot on one package converse with the tiger on another. And you came to understand that you, too, were part of her make-believe world. A component, a fixture. “Ibuki likes the width to Byakuya-chan,” Ibuki babbled. The off-white expanse of him. “When Ibuki draws close enough to Byakuya-chan, he eclipses her view.” Rendering distraction an impossibility, was the unspoken implication. “Ibuki likes Byakuya-chan's im-med-i-a-cy!” Other times Mioda liked to pretend that Byakuya-chan was a friendly dugong.

 

Mioda thrived on attention and withered in its absence. She had received demerits for acting out in class and for failing to play well with others for as long as she had attended school. "Ibuki performs," she explained. Sometimes Ibuki scared herself when she thought about how hard it was to differentiate her performances from what she did for herself. You were silent. She continued: "Ibuki doesn't know which parts of herself are part of her performance. She thinks maybe her shoulders, as they are theatrical. But then Byakuya-chan wouldn't know."

"He wouldn't," you agreed. Ibuki’s unique use of the third person was often convenient.

Ibuki kicked at the sidewalk. It was summer, then: she had come from her home to visit you in your Academy dormitory, where you staid year-round. She didn’t question this, never asked you to produce a mansion, a staff of servants, an investment portfolio. “Ibuki’s thinking of having her extensions out.”

You must have broken stride, because Ibuki turned around. “Byakuya-chan, it’s butt-long. It comes down to Ibuki's butt. How did you not know?”

 

Mioda had a handful of friends: Koizumi, Tsumiki, Saionji. Sato. You worried about them, about the jokes they made at her expense. The ones that Mioda seemed to ignore, or to miss. Mioda was tolerated by classmates and teachers, but appreciated by neither. You felt helpless in the face of Mioda's sorrow, which was multifaceted. Which seemed to advance as inevitably as a solar eclipse.

In hindsight, Mioda's problems were modest in scale. Her parents were likely only mildly tyrannical, and her critics well-meaning. But she had been seventeen, you had been seventeenish, and it had felt like the two of you were allied against the rest of the planet. She was a prodigy, each of her classmates was a prodigy. Her problems had been earth-shattering, in the teenage and prodigal world you had inhabited.

Mioda had, periodically, arrived in homeroom with freshly-butchered bangs, attacked the night before with safety scissors. In the summer after your second year at the Academy she was persuaded by a girl in the grade below them, a model and minor celebrity, to sign onto a trashy reality television show in which she and a slew of other Hope's Peak girls lived together in a locked mansion and were prompted frequently to wale on each other, teeth and nails bared, screaming incoherently. Mioda was popular with viewers, was a fan favorite. The stardom with which she returned to school, begotten through her association with Enoshima, became one of her few comforts. “Junko-chan says Ibuki plays well onscreen,” Mioda told you.

When Mioda sank, you followed her down. And then the island, the ocean. And then, and then.

 

When Mioda rises from the metallic, medical coffin labeled with her name, her hair is shorn to its roots. As is yours, to accommodate the electrodes that have been affixed to both of your bare scalps.

Absent too is her makeup. The piercings that used to constellate her face are gone, and the holes they've left behind have healed over. Her eyebrows have grown in black and coarse and patchy. You don't consider yourself capable of gauging beauty; Mioda is beautiful. You are incapable of love, and you love Mioda.

You have lost weight while sedated, intravenous fluid your only nutrition. Your skin hangs in loose folds that would horrify you if you took the time to examine them. Your legs malfunction, strengthless. So do Mioda's, as both of you scramble upwards, above the rims of the open mouths of your individual pods. Your eyes meet and wires snap, machines exclaim “oh, oh” in harried robotic tones. Mioda dives, and you follow her down. You crumple to the floor, to the gulf of cold tile that separates the two of you. You roll with her. People are shouting. She makes up the distance you fail to travel. Like waves you crash together. Stripped of disguises, the both of you. In this new world there is nothing to define you. For once you do not mind.


End file.
